


I want to taste those ruby lips

by PoeticallyIrritating



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: F/F, Gen, there aren't actually two rachel duncans, this probably doesn't belong in the f/f tag but i'm pretty gay for it so
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-30
Updated: 2014-11-30
Packaged: 2018-02-27 10:52:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2690138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PoeticallyIrritating/pseuds/PoeticallyIrritating
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rachel Duncan, autoeroticism, and a mirror.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I want to taste those ruby lips

**Author's Note:**

  * For [piggy09](https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/gifts).



> In the grand fandom tradition of writing porn for your friends. In this case, really weird porn? Happy birthday! [jazz hands]
> 
> Featuring a short but odd list of content warnings: sexual self-obsession, brief suicide mention, a description of the live dissection of a small lab animal.

In some of the stories, Narcissus kills himself because he cannot bear to love something he cannot touch. It’s in Ovid, Parthenius, Conon, in thick leather-bound volumes in her parents’ library, in sleek sterile new editions in the DYAD’s. Rachel’s parents did not believe in censorship, so she never read children’s versions where Narcissus simply wasted away transfixed by himself, or where the angle of the reflection made him mistake himself for a girl. She knew the story from the beginning: Narcissus fell in love with his reflection, and drowned himself in despair.

Rachel has always thought him a fool. First, of course, in the way that she thinks Romeo and Juliet are fools: self-destruction is an irrational response to forbidden love. Childish. Short-sighted. But Narcissus’ real crime is that his despair is predicated on false assumptions: namely, that he—in fact—cannot touch.

* * *

Rachel does not undress when she fucks Daniel. Daniel is in love with her, possibly, from the catch in his breathing when she emerges from the walk-in closet dressed in lace and satin, from the rabid glint in his eye when Rachel says _go,_ says _hunt,_ says _kill._ He has never seen her body; Rachel does not give her body like a gift.

People who have seen Rachel’s body since she came to the DYAD:

  *       Rachel’s physician
  *       Rachel.



(Rachel’s physician is a quiet woman with cold hands and a neutral, thin-lipped face. During appointments, Rachel digs her silver fingernails into the flesh of her palms; she clenches her teeth and waits for it to be over.)

* * *

Rachel leans against the end of her bed. There is a small table against the wall, lit by a lamp and arrayed with a collection of lipstick and mascara. There is a stool set in front of the table, just tall enough for someone Rachel’s height to sit on in heels with one leg crossed over the other. There is a drawer in the table, with a series of powders matched precisely to Rachel’s skin tone.

There is also a mirror.

She stands and reaches behind to unzip her dress, and as she does so she watches the curve of her arm above her head, the strained stretch of the sinews drawn taut beneath her skin. She holds the fabric in place as her other hand draws the zipper downward, her cold fingertips tracing the length of her spine. The ridges of her fingerprints drag along her skin, and she draws the dress down: over her arms, over her legs. She steps out of it with practiced balance. Her heels click against the hardwood floor.

She is wearing lace—has been wearing lace all day, has been smiling to herself at the secret of it, has been feeling it against her skin when she shakes hands with businessmen and in her eyes when she locks gaze with security guards and dismisses them with a glance. She is wearing lace and it rasps against her skin when she touches it.

When she touches it: her thumb drags the fabric across her breast and it makes her mouth open, breaking the seam between her lips. Her fingers draw downward, nails scraping—enough to hurt, not enough to leave a mark—and she watches her skin twitch, watches the reflected muscles ripple under her touch.

Now the shoes, to be placed neatly beside her on the floor. The sheer stockings end mid-thigh; she draws them down her legs, gathering fabric as she goes, palms warming against her skin. Her touch is delicate, tracing the lengths of her legs with something like reverence, except her hands do not shake, not for a moment. She discards the stockings. She strokes up the inside of her leg, watching the involuntary opening of red lips in the mirror; she feels the damp lace between her thighs and it is a cyclical process, isn’t it; the fact of the heat beneath her fingers sends a hot flush all under her skin, a redness in the skin across her chest.

Her other hand is against her breast, the roughness of the fabric too much and too little, scraping against skin too sensitive to scrape. Her breath catches and it coincides with a jump in her chest in the mirror, an exquisite shuddering motion that sends her pupils wide. She draws her hand from between her legs, carefully, and unhooks the lace bra in the back. She lets it drop to the floor and brings one hand up to trace the curve of her breast, uses thumb and forefinger to tease the nipple and watch it harden under her touch.

She removes the other lace item next, sliding it down over her hips. She sighs at the feel of the skin, bone, muscle beneath her hands, a heavy exhilarated breath. _Life is a miracle, Rachel,_ her father used to say. He let her watch as he injected an anesthetic into the veins of one of the white rats from the lab and pinned its feet to the table as it fell unconscious; as he sliced down the belly, the silver-glinting scalpel cutting through layers of skin and fat and muscle; as he pulled the layers away and pinned them down; as he whispered “look” and pointed with a gloved finger to the slow, steady beating of the rat’s insistent heart. _Life is a miracle,_ and now she can feel the thrum of the blood in her veins beneath her fingertips, the rapid beating of her own heart contained neatly behind her ribs, the stretch of the muscles in her legs as she shifts her weight.

Rachel catches her own eyes in the mirror and stares down the familiar face, blurring her vision until her face becomes dozens of other faces, faces that dot twenty-five countries.

Then she snaps her eyes back open. Snaps her vision back to crisp 20-20, and the face in the mirror back to her own, back to the red of her lips and the particular arch of her eyebrows and the lofty set of her jaw. Back to Rachel Duncan, the name that flashes onscreen when DYAD sequences her DNA and comes back with _249A18_. Every cell: _249A18_ which means _Rachel Duncan_ which means sharp lines and silver claws. _Rachel Duncan._

She strokes her left hand up the inside of her thigh and raises her eyes to the fluttering of her chest as her fingertips trace sensitive skin, and then draws her gaze upward again to the parting of her painted lips. She drags her fingers higher, and as she reaches the hot slickness of the arousal at the juncture of her thighs her eyelashes flutter. She does not allow her eyes to close. Instead she watches in the mirror as her ribcage expands and contracts in response to her lungs, as she touches herself with slow strokes, as her fingers slide slippery against her clit.

It will be over too fast, this way. She can feel the hot rush of blood through capillaries under fragile skin, and she lets her hand drop. It comes to rest, sticky and glistening against her thigh, and she rakes her eyes down her body in the mirror: the flush in her cheeks and chest, the taut strain of her stomach, the nail marks she didn’t realize she was making in her thigh with her other hand.

She takes four more breaths, in and out, the weight of them audible in the empty air, and then she draws her hand back between her legs. She slides three fingers inside herself and watches her own eyes widen in the mirror, watches the rapid in-and-out of her chest as her breaths come shallow and fast; she aches inside at the stretch of it and outside at her own inflexible refusal to brush against her clit, and for the first time she allows herself to make a sound beyond breathing, a shuddering moan that is obscene in its desperation.

She does not give in to herself, does not withdraw her careful fingers to provide friction, does not grind into her hand. Does not. Instead she watches the lines of her body grow taut and shaking, watches her entire body shudder with wanting. She can feel it in the clench of muscles around her fingers, in the uncontrollable convulsions of the thigh beneath her right hand. She has reached a deliciously gorgeous point of breaking, and she watches her own destruction painted on the gasping, shaking body in the mirror.

The noise she makes when she brings her right (cleverer, defter) hand to her clit is a sound of shattering. The hot fast grinding pressure of her fingertips sends her over the edge, and two mirror-image women in naked gasping desperate need sink their teeth into their lower lips as they come apart.

In two, three, four breaths, Rachel puts herself back together. She lets her hands drop to her sides; she sucks a drop of blood from her lip and smiles a red-tinged smile at the mirror.

**Author's Note:**

> (Incredibly over-the-top) title from "I Want Her" by Blind Truth.


End file.
